Klondike Sun ~ July 14, 2010
Parks Celebrates the Last Voyage of the SS Keno
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Story & Photos by Dan Davidson
The SS Keno celebrated the 50th anniversary of its final voyage to Dawson on July 3 with cake, kids games and tours of the boat.
While some 60 steamboats, along with a complement of tug and barges, were at the Dawson docks within a year of the Klondike Gold Rush, none of them have survived the toll of the years. Some sank, some burned, and more than half a dozen of them are decaying into the river bank north of town. The S.S. Keno, now on display alongside the Dawson dyke, was constructed two decades after the event, built in Whitehorse in 1922. It wasn’t built to serve the Dawson run but, as its name suggests, to haul the ore from the United Keno Hill Mine in Keno City and Elsa, operating out of Mayo on the Stewart River.
In 1960 the Keno made her last voyage along the Yukon River, perhaps ending its travelling life in Dawson at least partly because it would never have been able to get under the bridge at Stewart Crossing. As it was they had to take off the wheelhouse and lower the stack to get past the bridge at Carmacks.
It was the last steamboat to arrive in Dawson. Commissioner Geraldine Van Bibber, a child at the time, recalled the event vividly at the 2010 Commissioner’s Ball.
The boat was a hit in Dawson and became one of the places where the fledgling Klondike Visitors Association first entertained visiting tourists. Before the Palace Grand Theatre was rebuilt and Centennial Hall was turned into Diamond Tooth Gerties, the Keno was the home of tourist themed theatre productions.
It was damaged in the flood of 1979 and by the late 1980s it was clear that dry rot, the bane of many a beached vessel, was taking its toll. As part of the preparations for the Goldrush Centennials which ran from 1996 to 1998, the damaged portions of the boat were rebuilt over a period of several years and it is now open for tours of the freight deck, which contains interpretive panels describing its history, while a viewing station outside the boat deals in a more general way with river life.
The July 3 celebration began with a Parks’ staff skit intended to show how the population relied on the boats to bring them news, old friends and, most important of all, fresh food supplies and fruit at the beginning of each traveling season after the long winter’s isolation in the days before reliable highway transportation.
Folks lined up for cake and tours of both the freight deck and the normally closed off second deck. Kids made and sailed small boats in tubs borrowed from the goldpanning championships and entered races where they carried crates and loaded sacks up and down the grade to the top of the dyke.
In a tent shelter below the dyke on the boat’s starboard site, J.J. Van Bibber recalled his days on the river when he ran timber rafts on the Stewart and Yukon rivers and was sometimes a spotter on the steamboats.
Download full online edition (pdf – 8.8 MB): July-14-2010 (426)
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IN THIS ISSUE:
1 – 2 – SS Keno
3 – One Fish, Two Fish, Construction, Lightning
4 – Uffish Thoughts
5 – Letters, What to See and Do in Dawson
6 – 7 – Canada Day
8 – Humane Society, DCMF, and Parks Day
9 – Archaeology
10 – Meg Walker, Meet Lizzie
11 – Gold Panning Championships
12-16 – TV Guide pages deleted
17 – Moosehide Gathering
18 – Dawson City Town Tour, Cover Me Badd II, Foxtail
19 – Jeramy Dodds, Birthe Piontek
20 – Visitor of the Week
21 – Birds, Sudoku, Cartoons
22 – DC Minor Soccer, CKS News
23 – Classifieds
24 – City of Dawson
